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Sunday, March 9, 2008

Hope in the Future

The article below, from today's New York Times, is about a beautiful new chapel being built at St. Anthony's High School on Long Island. Br. Gary Cregan, OSF, the principal at St. Anthony's, used to be the Assistant Principal at the High School in Raleigh were I taught. I could write at length about Brother Gary and the influence he has been on thousands of lives (including my own), and their discernment of vocations. While the article isn't directly about vocations, I think you will agree that a chapel like this, and a sense of the transcendent in our faith can only help students to contemplate God's will for their lives. (emphases andcommentsmine)

BROTHER GARY CREGAN, a Franciscan friar and the principal of St. Anthony’s High School here, speaks plainly when discussing the modernist architecture of many area parochial schools and churches built in the mid-20th century.

“I have a general disgust for Catholic architecture since the 1950s,” he said recently. Dressed in a brown (BLACK) habit belted with rope, he becomes animated — even enthusiastic — as he discusses the high school’s plan to build a new, more traditional chapel.

The $3 million structure, designed by Baldassano Architecture, is inspired by a 12th-century Romanesque apse (the Fuentiduena Chapel) that is part of the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Upper Manhattan, according to Alex Badalamenti, one of the architects who worked on the school’s design.

That ancient apse, from Segovia, Spain, is a semicircular room with a half-dome ceiling and a central fresco.

The new school chapel, with a yellowish limestone veneer that does faintly resemble the coloring and style of the Cloisters apse, also adds a bell tower, and is meant to bring back an older tradition of worship, Brother Cregan said.

Many modernist churches, he added, are laid out horizontally. The school chapel that is being replaced, for example, is integrated into a side wing of the building with a classroom-style entry door, across the hall from a science lab. Its ceilings are eight feet high, and behind the pews there is a small niche with an electronic keyboard.

By contrast, the new building and its tower are rising from behind a glass corridor that connects the two wings of the school — classrooms on one side and the gym and auditorium on the other.

Brother Cregan and other Franciscans who “want to stress verticality,” he said, believe that the new chapel, with its soaring 30-foot ceilings, will teach teenagers that they are “worshiping God, not each other.”(AMEN!)

In church architecture, the return to traditionalism is a trend across the country, according to Duncan Stroik, a specialist in the design of Catholic churches.

Mr. Stroik is also a professor at the University of Notre Dame, in the school’s classical architecture and traditional cities program, one of the few of its kind.

For a high school, he said, the decision to go traditional is unusual. “It’s so interesting that the high school is fairly contemporary, but the chapel is consciously a separate building,” he said. “Even from the outside, you can tell that it’s something different.”

Mr. Stroik explained that many of his clients these days express the desire for a church that lures people, rather than one that simply provides a functional gathering place.

As he put it: “There’s this sense that in walking into a vertical space, whether it’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral or Grand Central station, on the one hand you are in awe of how grand it is, and how small you are. But also there’s a kind of feeling that you are lifted up, you are ennobled.”

In the case of the Huntington school’s new chapel, some ennobling accessories were acquired with the help of modern technology. Stepping gingerly through the chapel construction site, Mr. Cregan pointed out his bargain-price purchases on eBay, the Internet auction Web site. These included the confessionals and pews, a 110-year-old arched stained glass window and a 100-year-old statue of St. Anthony. (There is also a 14th century marble altar front with a traditional pelican design - you can see the altar front and more pictures of the chapel HERE)

He is proudest of the bell suspended from the top of the tower — another eBay find, for $4,000. A new one would have cost $20,000, according to John Petrocelli of the J. Petrocelli Construction Company, which is building the chapel.

The new chapel will seat 300, about twice the number accommodated by the current chapel. But for Brother Cregan and the school administration, bringing the chapel more in line with purist Franciscan traditions is the more pressing goal.

Many details of the design, including the unadorned archways and a wooden trussed ceiling in place of the more grandiose arched ceiling of stone or brick, have a Franciscan air, Mr. Stroik said. “There seems to be a Franciscan simplicity about it,” he added. “Looking at the exterior, there’s a simple stone facade, simple openings. The tower — it’s traditional, but not very ornate.”

There are 11 Catholic high schools on Long Island, according to the Diocese of Rockville Centre. Enrollment has been rising steadily by about 2 percent in the high schools over the last decade, Brother Cregan said, after a period in the late 1980s when several parochial schools in the area closed. St. Anthony’s is coeducational, with 2,400 students in Grades 9 through 12. Some students commute from as far east as Cutchogue and Water Mill, or from Queens to the west.

The school, which moved to its current campus in 1984 from Kings Park in Smithtown, is making other changes too. A field behind the school now holds a steel skeleton that will eventually be a $34 million 140,000-square-foot student activities center. The rendering, on a sign near the site, shows a glassy modern design.

Next fall, when the chapel is complete, students will take up the ancient activity of bell ringing for services, using a simple rope in the bell tower.

There might be some laughing from kids watching through the glass wall in the cafeteria next door. But that’s the idea, Brother Cregan said. “It’s in classic Franciscan fashion,” he explained, for the church to be “in the marketplace, not high on a hill.”

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His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

"Prayer itself, born in Catholic families, nurtured by programs of Christian formation, strengthened by the grace of the sacraments, is the first means by which we come to know the Lord’s will for our lives. To the extent that we teach young people to pray, and to pray well, we will be cooperating with God’s call. Programs, plans and projects have their place; but the discernment of a vocation is above all the fruit of an intimate dialogue between the Lord and his disciples. Young people, if they know how to pray, can be trusted to know what to do with God’s call." Pope Benedict XVI

If you are looking for books or DVDs related to Roman Catholic Vocations, click on the image above and scroll down.

Cure of Ars Prayer Group Diocese of Raleigh (click on image)

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you. 'Ah, Lord God!' I said, 'I know not how to speak; I am too young.' But the Lord answered me, Say not, 'I am too young.' To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak. Have no fear before them, because I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord." ~Jer 1:5-8

"All this serves as a reminder that God calls you to be saints, and that sanctity is the secret of real success in your priestly ministry. From this moment on, sanctity must be the final goal of all your choices and decisions. Entrust this desire and this daily commitment to Mary, Mother of Trust".

Pope Benedict XVI

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

“The pastoral care of vocations needs to involve the entire Christian community in every area of its life. Obviously, this pastoral work on all levels also includes exploring the matter with families, which are often indifferent or even opposed to the idea of a priestly vocation. Families should generously embrace the gift of life and bring up their children to be open to doing God's will. In a word, they must have the courage to set before young people the radical decision to follow Christ, showing them how deeply rewarding it is.”
Pope Benedict XVI
(Sacramentum Caritatis, 25)